Yeah, that's looking good! Though I agree the salarians are a bit too recognisable as such. If you can keep the general idea but tweak it a bit that would be cool. And those "highlights" for the manes and such are a good idea.

I'm less sure about the backgrounds. To be honest I don't really know what suggest. Those flowers are a bit too cheesy. The "curved lines" one is better. Not sure what would work best.

BTW, so far you've always shown me complete graphics, but I assume you could give me the portrait shapes and the backgrounds separately right? I'd like to be able to combine them in-game.

Yes , I'll give you the profile files with transparency and the backgrounds for combining them in game. The shape degrade is also fun/easy to obtain, magic wand selection for just the shape and gradient fill of some sort that depends on the background.

View them as medium thumbnails, they're about the same size as in game, might give you an ideea how they'll look.

If you want to make them automatic, than both the shapes and the backgrounds need to be unicolor and even so some weird or plain ugly combinations might appear. It might be better to create the images one by one as it takes something like 10minutes to do a 2 or 3 layered composition (speciality, shape, background) and then each variation some 30 seconds or so even without widening the shape or moving the background or tweaking saturation (I've attached also an example worked in free Paint.Net).

Looks good! Not sure what you mean by this however: "If you want to make them automatic, than both the shapes and the backgrounds need to be unicolor and even so some weird or plain ugly combinations might appear". I already do layering in Nox, for the icons for crews and the icons for outfits. In both cases the upper layers are just transparent PNGs, so you can do partially transparent zones (for the dithering on the edge) without problems. If you can provide the silhouettes as transparent PNGs of the target size, I should be able to apply them in-game over the backgrounds without issues.

For the Ardars and the Betelgians, your portraits are good for a first run, and there's enough variety. Thanks!

For the humans, I'm still undecided on whether to use those graphics or the existing ones... I do like the current one, but of course it's not very coherent with the rest. Maybe leave this aside for now and finish the aliens first?

To summarise, if you can do the following:- provide the Ardars and Betelgians portraits you've made as transparent PNGs of the target size- find some backgrounds for them, ideally two-three per factions (the Betelgian one is good)- (if possible, otherwise later) do the same for the Ixumites (one set of silhouettes is fine for both, but different backgrounds)- (also if possible, and probably even later) do more random humanoid/alien shapes for minor races

The two-level silhouettes like that woman look good. If you want to use that to give more details to the alien faces it would be great, up to you, but indeed it can wait for a further release since it takes more time.

Hi, I meant that in most images, I had to add a degradée adapted to the shape (lighter on dark backrounds, also the orientation). But for simple backgrounds, once they're decided, a particular nuance of grey should work for one race, and that is easily done.

No need to ask me weather to do it either way, it's pro bono work for me and I get a feel of satisfaction out of it. I might set out to do a set of humans in the varieties shown in the game folder, and overwrite that in the folder, play and tweak it until I'm satisfied and then present the "bomb" to you. But that is for a later date, I agree.

I had to rework quite a bit the ardar files into one cohesive with multiple layers (just select background and profile).Here are concepts, the transparent files in the archive

I'll make you an advanced save. Just know that if you just want to "cheat" to easily go around the Galaxy, you can access the console using F2 from which you can use a lot of dev commands. Some useful:

Give money:player.pay(10000)

Teleport to any planet or system:player.teleport("Terra")

Give you an outfit (works for licenses also):player.addOutfit("Some Item", 1)

Makes you invincible:player.pilot():setInvincible(true)

You can see a lot more there: api.naev.org

(Nox have a few others that are not listed there by they are not useful for debugging)

Assuming you are on Windows, the saves are in: C:\Users\<you login>\AppData\Roaming\noximperii\saves ("AppData" is a hidden directory)

Your humanoids are fine A bit cheesy but with outlines they need to be to be distinctive, I agree. Don't hesitate to try more outlandish shapes. Did you read the descriptions of the natives races?

Your Ixumites are too cheesy however... (though they'd be fine as generic aliens). Maybe that mane thing is a bad idea, not workable with just silhouettes. Maybe lanky aliens with visible cat-like ears? Though that might be cheesy too.

Other thing, I think we need to have a bit variety in backgrounds to make them more distinct. Maybe a bit of range in the silhouettes colours too. For example, the Ardars don't stand out very well on their metal background; maybe have the silhouettes be a range of dark green instead? And for the Betelgians, make up half a dozen backgrounds from that vector pict?

We'll also need backgrounds for the neutral races and barbarians. For the latter I'd imagine dark red backgrounds with ominous patterns, for the neutrals no idea really. Something neutral? :p

And thanks again for your work, it's great to no longer have human portraits for all my aliens!

I think I'll wrap up 0.5.1 this week, my boarding rework is mostly done and that was the big task left. Do you think you'll have time to finish the silhouettes? If not not an issue at all, it will go in a future release. I just want to know if I should move it to a separate branch for now